Liquid Telecom Kenya has announced its operations will not be affected by the slow Internet speeds expected between 20th – 28th July 2016 in Kenya following the ongoing maintenance works on the East African Marine System (TEAMS) undersea cable which is jointly owned by Liquid Telecom Kenya, Safaricom, Telkom Kenya, Jamii Telecom, Wananchi Telecom, Access Kenya Group and Bandwidth & Cloud Services Group.
The firm has said its network provides connectivity onto five different main subsea cable systems landing in Africa, setting it apart from other Internet Providers, who often only connect to one or two. This provides for alternative routes, thus cushioning their clients from Internet outage. The cable systems are; WACS, EASSY, SEACOM, SAT3 and TEAMs. Three of the undersea cables are linked to Kenya; SEACOM, EASSY and TEAMS.
“We believe in redundancy, that is why our network is designed not only with the submarine capacity, but also with the terrestrial redundancy, this way we can cope with any failures in cables, fibre cuts, or any other issues while still maintaining optimum service to our customers,” said Andrew Alston, Head of IP Strategy at Liquid Telecom Kenya.
Businesses that rely solely on capacity on the TEAMS system will experience a complete outage until such time as alternate capacity is sourced or the TEAMS system is restored.
“We have sufficient capacity to reroute off the TEAMS capacity onto other cable systems to cover the loads, so there will not be any service degradation for our customers,” added Alston.
Besides TEAMS, Liquid Telecom is linked to SEACOM and EASSY in Kenya. The company says it also has the option to reroute via South Africa, if need be, and then onto the WACS and SAT3 cable systems.
The maintenance work on the TEAMS undersea cable is being undertaken to enhance its security off-shore from the United Arab Emirates against anchoring ships, as well as to allow for expansion of the UAE port of Fujairah.
